Hiking around Herzogenrath and Christmas market!

There’s this stretch of nature that I have been aware of for some time near Herzogenrath. It’s a very narrow area that you would probably not notice if you take a look at the map of North Rhine Westphalia. You would notice it only if you zoom in a lot. Frankly it feels a little bit weird when you notice there’s actually a possibility to organize a hike there, in the middle of this farmland. And I guess we can hike there only once without repeating the route. I had this route for some time, and this time Davy made me aware of a nice Christmas market at Herzogenrath, which I didn’t know was free. So it gave us a reason to go to Herzogenrath for the first time.

Maybe because of the weather or maybe because people already left Düsseldorf, unfortunately not so many people signed up. Anyway the train was somehow extremely empty. On top of this, it got a delay on the way, but it managed to catch up, which is such an unlikely event for the German railway. Not bad.

We first had to cross the city, which was a small one, but as soon as the nature started, it felt like we were purely surrounded by the nature, even though as I already said there was civilization right behind the trees. That’s the funny thing about forests – it just makes us see the trees and not what’s behind, in stark contrast to fields.

Just like every year, this time of the year is super wet everywhere. We also had to fight with the slippery ground. There were some people who had joined before while being super unprepared. I’m glad that they were properly prepared this time.

Today for some reason there was a relatively large number of German people in the hike, but they all somehow preferred to speak English. I have the feeling that there’s a growing tendency for everyone to speak English these days, even if everyone speaks German. I wonder where it’s gonna go in a few years. Maybe we fully stop speaking German in cities like Düsseldorf. Let’s see.

There was a table at the middle point today, where we had a break. I took my cooking set with some canned food. It’s the season again for this kind of activity.

I had feared that the hike would be super flat. It was indeed somewhat flat, but I don’t think it was too flat. For a winter hike I guess it was a pretty nice one.

I don’t quite understand but not many people joined for the Christmas market afterwards. As I already indicated at the beginning, it was in a medieval castle. There were a lot of people, but not overcrowded like the ones in Düsseldorf or Essen. I was actually super happy to have a place to sit in a medieval setting and drink “met”, which is a German alcoholic drink with honey, which I forgot I actually didn’t like.

Except for the medieval aspect, I was kind of amused to see the flee market style of this Christmas market. I wanted to buy at least something small, but then we realized that our train got cancelled, and had to take an earlier one. So we left the Christmas market in a hurry.

This time the train was super crowded. Fortunately I got a seat, but it would have been really difficult if it had been a few stops later. I really needed a seat this time, as I have been sick now for 2 weeks (which is a super rare thing to happen), and after the cup of met, I was sort of dizzy.